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Trump’s Smartest Supporters Know the Iran War Is a Disaster

The new consensus is that the American empire is in steep decline.

Donald Trump departs Doral, Florida, en route to his Palm Beach mansion on May 2, 2026.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an essay with a startling headline: “America Is Officially An Empire In Decline.” To be sure, the column’s arguments—both that the United States is, in fact, an imperial power, and that Donald Trump’s failed war in Iran is only the latest evidence that America’s power is fading—are old hat on the left, made many times in publications like The Nation or Jacobin. They are much less likely to be found in the Times, save for the occasional op-ed. The newspaper as a whole prefers to speak to disguise the reality of empire in euphemistic terms such as “the liberal international order” or “American hegemony.”

Even more startling than the blunt language was the person behind it: not a left-winger, but conservative stalwart Christopher Caldwell. Over the last decade, Caldwell has occupied a lonely niche as the most intellectually cogent defender of Trumpism. A cosmopolitan and literate writer, Caldwell shares the core MAGA belief that liberal elites have damaged the United States through lax immigration, the promotion of cultural diversity, and economic globalism.

Caldwell seems to have taken Donald Trump’s “America First” rhetoric more seriously than the president himself. Giving credence to Trump’s criticism of neoconservative-regime change war, Caldwell hoped for a new foreign policy of restraint in Europe and the Middle East, coupled with a redoubling of US power in the Western Hemisphere. From this perspective, Caldwell can almost find some “coherence” in Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his threats to invade Cuba, and even his talk of annexing Greenland.

The invasion of Iran undermines this project of hemispheric domination, and Caldwell knows it. In mid-March in The Spectator, he decried the Iran War as “the end of Trumpism.” In his latest Times column, he correctly notes that the war has shown the limits of US coercive power, especially since the depletion of cruise missiles in the conflict means the American Empire is now forced to cannibalize weapons deployed in Europe and Asia.

Caldwell’s strongest argument is that the US only faces bad options:

[The US] can desist in Iran—having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or........

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